Despite its smattering of electoral victories a few weeks ago, the Democratic Party has two problems that threaten its long-term viability.

First, it has strayed too far left. Second, the most influential and vocal elements within the party want it to go still further in that direction, all the way to the unabashed socialism of New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani (what Michael Barone calls "barista socialism").

If the Democratic problem is thus essentially ideological in nature--their increasingly open embrace of an ideology that Americans have long rejected--the Republican problem, in turn, derives from the absence of ideology.

That there is no coherent, remotely consistent ideological content to contemporary Republicanism means that in some respects the GOP has ceased to be a political party in the way political parties have traditionally been defined.

That lack of ideological principles with which to guide public policy and political goals stems, of course, from the displacement of the political conservatism that dominated the GOP since before World War II by the decidedly non-conservative MAGA movement and its loyalty to a political figure, Donald Trump, who lacks ideological principles of any kind.

Over the course of the past year, it has been virtually impossible to figure out what the Republican Party stands for because its........

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